Posts By PHYLLIS BRAUN - AJP Executive Editor

Around 60 women gathered in the Tucson Jewish Community Center sculpture garden at 7 p.m. on Oct. 14 as the Jewish Federation of Southern Arizona Women’s Philanthropy installed its new board. The evening served as an update on the issue of sex trafficking, a subject discussed at last year’s… Read more »

Karen Grinzaid

Karen A. Grinzaid, MS, CGC, CCRC, senior director and co-founder of JScreen, will present “Knowledge is Power: Impacting the Health of Future Generations” at a Tucson Maimonides Society dinner on Nov. 12 at the La Paloma Country Club. The Maimonides Society is a fellowship of doctors dedicated to education… Read more »

The Jewish Culture Shuk (Hebrew for “marketplace”) returns Sunday, Nov. 15 with an evening of adult education classes taught by more than a dozen local rabbis and educators. Presented by the Jewish Federation of Southern Arizona’s Coalition for Jewish Education and the Synagogue-Federation Dialogue and held at Tucson Hebrew… Read more »

Bob Harris

Bob Harris, a former policy and management expert with the federal government, will lead a four-part discussion series sponsored by Hadassah Southern Arizona at the Tucson Jewish Community Center, beginning Thursday, Nov. 12. Topics will be “Combating the Islamic State or ISIS” on Nov. 12; “Debt Crisis from Greece… Read more »

Cyrel Bandy

The Beth Shalom Temple Center, serving Green Valley and Sahuarita, will celebrate its 20th anniversary with a full weekend of activities beginning on Nov. 20. Located at 1751 N. Rio Mayo in Green Valley, the Temple Center is the successor to a grassroots organization that began in the early… Read more »

Rabbi Joel Oseran

Rabbi Joel Oseran, D.D., vice president of the World Union for Progressive Judaism, will present “The ‘New’ Jews Face the ‘New’ Anti-Semitism in the ‘New’ Europe — Implications for Reform Jews in Europe and Around the World,” at Temple Emanu-El’s Shabbat evening service, Friday, Nov. 13 at 7:30 p.m.… Read more »

Amy Hirshberg Lederman

My husband Ray died on June 15, 2015, exactly three years, seven months and six days after he was diagnosed with lung cancer. From the beginning, we were a team and it became “our” cancer. We discussed everything, from chemo and hair loss to how to share difficult news… Read more »

Beth Greenberg

Beth Greenberg is the new director of opera at the University of Arizona. She joined the faculty of the UA’s Fred Fox School of Music this fall after serving as a resident stage director at the New York City Opera for more than 20 years. Under Greenberg’s direction, the… Read more »

Lauren Grossman

Tucson author Lauren B. Grossman found the inspiration for her second novel, “The Golden Peacock,” in a souvenir from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. When visiting the museum about a decade ago, Grossman was handed the identity card of a Holocaust survivor, randomly selected from a bin. She… Read more »

The High Holidays are a meaningful time to reflect and celebrate. For University of Arizona students observing the holidays away from home, Hillel provides a warm and welcoming space. More than 150 Jewish Wildcats attended evening and morning Rosh Hashanah services plus an Erev Rosh Hashanah dinner featuring all… Read more »

Dennis Ross

Former Middle East peace envoy Dennis Ross, author of the new book “Doomed to Succeed: The U.S.-Israel Relationship from Truman to Obama,” will speak at the Jewish Federation of Southern Arizona’s free Together community event on Wednesday, Nov. 18 at 7 p.m. at Congregation Anshei Israel. The event will… Read more »

  (JTA) — Ever wonder what the perfect pop-culture storm looks like? Hurricane Ruth — as in Bader Ginsburg — was brewing among millennials, feminists and across social media platforms before it made landfall in Irin Carmon and Shana Knizhnik’s new biography about the Meme Supreme: “Notorious RBG: The… Read more »

TEL AVIV (JTA) — Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas accused Israel of tampering with the status quo on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount. He railed against Jews defiling the holy site with their “filthy feet.” He claimed, falsely, that Israeli security forces had killed a 13-year old Palestinian boy. It’s that… Read more »

(JTA) — I remember the assassination like it was yesterday. Yitzhak Rabin was dead, and so was the peace process. Hope on both sides was extinguished. The country was not only in mourning — it was in shock, paralyzed by the magnitude of one of our own killing a national… Read more »

THE HAGUE, Netherlands (JTA) — On his way to several meetings with Dutch parliamentarians last week, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and his entourage passed 300 demonstrators flying Israeli flags. Like the Israeli government, the protesters, who convened outside at the urging of Dutch Jewish and Christian pro-Israel groups, accuse… Read more »

TEL AVIV (JTA) — Some 100,000 people joined together in central Tel Aviv on Saturday to pay tribute to slain Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, but they were divided over what exactly they were rallying for. The demonstration, which marked the 20th anniversary of Rabin’s assassination by a Jewish extremist… Read more »

Palestinians are on the wrong track and will not get off it until the outside world demands better of them. News comes every year or two of a campaign of violence spurred by Palestinian political and religious leaders spreading wild-eyed conspiracy theories (the favorite: Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem is… Read more »

  (JTA) — Jewish leaders have long warned of the bleak Jewish futures in store for children of intermarriage. But these prognostications were based largely on information from more than a decade ago, when intermarriage was far less common and far less accepted by American Jews than it is today.… Read more »

(TPS) – Last week, the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) approved a resolution in which it listed Rachel’s Tomb, located just south of Jerusalem and the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron, as Islamic sites. The resolution not only stirred up a firestorm of protests from many in… Read more »

SAN FRANCISCO (Tazpit) – Bandura Games, a computer gaming company based in San Francisco, California, is set to launch a new mobile game app that would bridge gaps, build connections and create empathy between people from different sides of conflict zones. Initially interested in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Justin Hefter,… Read more »